OO PHP | Properly Passing POST Paramaters - php

Question

I am relatively new to OO PHP and I am trying to create a login class.
The issue I am having is that I want to pass the POST values username and password to my class but I cannot establish a decent way of doing so.
below is a snippet of my class
class PortalLogin{
private $username;
private $password;
function __construct(){
//I connect to DB here
}
function login($username, $password){
//error check the paramaters here
//then I can run the query
}
function __destruct(){
//I disconnect from DB here
}
}
Above is a breakdown of the class I am creating below is how i plan to execute it (my main issue at the moment).
$login = new PortalLogin();
if(isset($_POST['username'])){
if(isset($_POST['password'])){
$login->login($_POST[username],$_POST[password]);
} else {
//throw error
}
} else {
//throw error
}
I really do not like the construction of the code above it seems to messy to be doing so much outside of my class. how can I pass the POST information to the class and execute the checks there? I am worrying that if I pass the POST information to the class and one of the POSTS contains nothing it will error.

Answer 1

I think you got a problem with the syntax of post..
if(isset($_POST['username']) && isset($_POST['password'])){
$login->login($_POST['username'],$_POST['password']);
}
use AND.. so if both username and password exist then call the login function()

Answer 2

I’m not sure where OOP comes in to this, but if you were going the object-oriented route you would have a class that represents a request from which you could grab POST data from:
$username = $request->post('username');
$password = $request->post('password');
Your post() method could return a default value (null) if the variable didn’t exist in the POST data.
You could then have a class that checks your user based on these variables:
$auth = new AuthService($dbConnection);
if ($auth->checkCredentials($username, $password)) {
// Valid user
} else {
$error = $auth->getLastError();
}

Answer 3

I know I might be in the minority with suggesting this, but I favour static methods for things like this. PortalLogin represents an action rather than data
class PortalLogin
{
/**
* Attempt login
* #param string $username
* #param string $password
*/
public static function login ($username, $password)
{
// do your login stuff
}
}
Then to use you would do this:
if (isset($_POST['username']
&& !empty($_POST['username']
&& isset($_POST['password']
&& !empty($_POST['password']
) {
PortalLogin::login($_POST['username'], $_POST['password']);
}
Even better OO would be to have the username/password checking baked into the User class. (Maybe User::checkLoginCredentials($u, $p); // boolean yup/nope)

Answer 4

You can use error suppression, like this:
$login->login(#$_POST['username'], #$_POST['password']);
If one or both values are not present in the $_POST variable, there won't be an error when calling the method, so you can do the error handling inside your class method.
For more info, check:
http://php.net/manual/en/language.operators.errorcontrol.php
Edit:
Another option is to do this:
$login->login((isset($_POST['username']) ? $_POST['username'] : null), (isset($_POST['password']) ? $_POST['password'] : null));